Sean Bennett Press Biography

Sean Bennett is an American entrepreneur, neuroscientist, political commentator, artifical intelligence researcher, and recording pianist as well as coach of prodigies and touring concert pianists.

Entrepreneur: Bennett has been a self-supporting and self-funding serial entrepreneur since age 17. After initial business successes in advertising sales, guide books, and rare books, and after brief affiliations with McKinsey & Co. and A.T. Kearney as a consultant, he is currently is the CEO of two companies: BennettBooksLtd/Bennett Arbitrage, a multinational arbitrage company using binomial asset pricing models and arbitrage theory optimizing a 4 million item product line offered across 25 e-commerce sites with over 1 million books sold to date, and GridFreed.com, an invention company that seeks to innovate solutions to problems of centralized dependency in water, food, energy, consumable production, and other areas.

Neuroscientist: for the last decade, Bennett has been the world's expert on the science behind how and why music sticks in peoples' thoughts. He first studied Neuroscience at Harvard University with psychologist Richard Hackman as a USA Today All-USA College Team member and Target Scholar. After receiving his degree at Harvard, Bennett attended Cambridge University in the United Kingdom as a Gates Cambridge Scholarship recipient. There he was elected chair of the Gates Scholars Council by 73% of voting scholars, allowing him to work simultaneously with Bill Gates Sr. to promote Gates Foundation aims in addition to his continued studies on memorable music.

Bennett then taught extensively at Cambridge University as a psychologist, neuroscientist, and pianist. He returned to Harvard in 2004 where he won the Bok Teaching Award recognizing the top student evaluation ratings for his neuroscience teaching with bestselling author Steven Pinker, and where he also investigated the neuroscience of teams for the Central Intelligence Agency and published the results with Richard Hackman and Stephen Kosslyn. While in the Boston area, he also worked as the Associate Director of the Multidisciplinary Institute for Neuropsychological Development (MIND), a center that used neuroscience research for the benefit of exceptionally gifted and learning disabled children.

Political commentator: Bennett is also a frequent participant on television, radio, and internet blogs regarding political issues. He worked directly with Noam Chomsky at MIT as one of his students of linguistics and cognitive science and then as a research assistant in the period from 2000-2001, and credits Chomsky with significantly influencing his formative political thought. His media credits to date include appearances in the Windy City Times, the Chronicle of Higher Education, USA Today, interviews with The Guardian and Reuters, on NBCnews, in Business 2.0/CNN.com, and numerous times on Bruce Dumont's nationally-syndicated radio show "Beyond the Beltway" (also on WYCC 20 TV). Recently he has been tapped by Bruce Dumont to begin providing his own regular commentary as an independent in the form of web videos to boost the social media and brand portfolio of the Beyond the Beltway Brand, and has been asked to be a member of the Junior Board of Directors for the Museum of Broadcast Communication.

Artificial Intelligence: With a 20+ year interest in Artificial Intelligence, Bennett has conducted research regarding the threats "bad actors" may cause to society using AI, originally mentored by AI pioneer and MIT faculty Marvin Minsky in Cambridge, MA. Since 2023, Bennett has given numerous talks at conferences on the existential threats to humanity of misuse of Artifical Intelligence and the need for immediate regulatory guardrails. These are available upon request by contacting Bennett.

Pianist: Commonly regarded as a former child-prodigy, Bennett won a prize in a Disney song-arranging contest at 5, recorded Chopin's Minute Waltz at 6 (video on YouTube), gave his debut concert at the age of 7 playing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody #2, won national acclaim in the PTA Reflections composition contest at 10, and at 14, gained international attention after becoming the one of the youngest in the world to ever perform and record Rachmaninov's 3rd Piano Concerto, resulting in a Steinway B grand piano being gifted to Bennett by an ecstatic benefactor. This benefactor further enabled studies with Juilliard and Curtis Faculty, including John Browning, Peter Serkin, Emanuel Ax, Jerome Lowenthal, Seymour Lipkin, Leon Fleisher, Dmitry Paperno, and Gary Graffman. Positive reviews by the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis Star, Ruth Laredo, Marvin Hamlisch, and John Bell Young, established him on the performing circuit through his teenage years.

At 19, after giving 400 solo concerts and performing with many orchestras, on NPR, regular radio, television, performing for the foreign consulates of 20 countries and Polish President Lech Walesa, and being named a winner in 50 local, national, and international competitions including the Kosciuszko National Chopin Competition and 7 awards from Steinway, Bennett retired from competitions. At this time, he set to study piano in isolation so he could release recordings directly to the public.

In 1998, his first recordings on MP3.com and on Vitaminic.com were downloaded by over 300,000 music enthusiasts, earning Bennett a rank in the top 10 classical artists among 240,000 on MP3.com and a translation of his page into 17 languages. In May and October of 2004, Bennett was ranked as the #1 most downloaded classical artist on the Internet by Download.com, and ranked in the Top Ten for downloads of songs from all musical genres. He remains to this day the only classical artist on Download.com to have had a Top Ten selection. On Vitaminic, until their closure, he was in the top ten classical artists continuously for nearly 2 years. In September 2006, he became the 11th most viewed music channel on Youtube.com for the week and the #1 most viewed classical channel. To date, his download and view count on Youtube is well over 1,000,000. His recordings are also available on 122 commercial download sites, cell phone mp3 providers, and coffeeshop music compilations, including many of the most well-known brands (iTunes, Napster, Starbucks, Rhapsody, RollingStone.com, eMusic, and others).

In 2002-2005 by ear, Bennett became one of the first to transcribe, record, and perform the set of the famed Vladimir Horowitz arrangements in a 25 concert tour throughout the UK. Artistically, Bennett now prepares for his next generation of transcriptions and arrangements to be released on video directly to the public. He releases many free recordings in order to encourage more individuals to understand, appreciate, and learn the art of music. These recordings while highly controversial have made and continue to make Bennett one of the most downloaded and fan-inspiring classical artists available on the Internet.

Bennett has taught musicians for almost 30 years. His teaching activities have focused on masterclasses and ongoing coaching of prodigious talents and touring concert artists. He has advised several former Verbier Academy students, as well as the winner of the National MTNA Senior Piano title, the 1st prize winner of the Amateur Van Cliburn International Competition, 1st prize Geneva, and 1st prize Rubinstein International Competition winners, the Gold medalist of the Junior and Senior Tchaikovsky competition, as well as several under 18 emerging talents through an appointment as Artist Advisory and College Prep Faculty at the New Music School in Chicago. His concert artist advisees to date have included Alexander Malofeev, Benjamin Grosvenor, Alexandre Kantorow, and others. He teaches on two pianos of note, both Concert and Artist Steinway Ds formerly belonging to Van Cliburn and Sergei Rachmaninov. He splits his time between San Diego, Las Vegas, and Chicago.